Agribusiness.

Small scale farming is one of the biggest industries in the world, with 500 million small farms and 2.5 billion people relying on small scale farming on a daily basis. The demand for impact investing in rural agriculture is growing as investors strive to end poverty and hunger to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The ABC Fund will also focus on creating employment, particularly for young people in Africa, to offer them an alternative to migration.

Discussion of digital agriculture innovation often focuses on buzzworthy technologies like the internet of things, artificial intelligence and blockchain. But though these technologies will eventually define the future of the sector, Ananth R Gudipati at the World Food Programme and Paul Kweheria at Mercy Corps say we should start with the basics – getting farmer organizations and SMEs to use digital tech to streamline their operations. They share insights from a digital platform developed by the Farm to Market Alliance that’s doing just that.

You'd think that ethnocentrism – judging another culture by the standards or values of one's own – would be relatively rare in the global, cosmopolitan social impact sector. In fact, says KadAfrica founder Rebecca Kaduru, it's alive and well, as social entrepreneurs must often adapt to ethnocentric definitions to secure the funding necessary to grow their enterprises. She explores why this dynamic has to change.

As mobile technology becomes nearly ubiquitous, the next wave of users is expected to come from rural regions, where smallholder farmers produce the majority of the food yet often live in poverty. In these areas, data-driven agriculture is already creating a new economy – one in which data itself is the currency that can help lift farmers out of poverty. Bobbi Gray and Ellen Galdava discuss an upcoming Grameen Foundation paper, supported by USAID and FHI 360, on this quickly shifting dynamic.

The premise is simple: Provide five hens and one rooster to several million poor families, especially rural women, so they can earn income at home by selling eggs. But Pakistan is also facing dire macroeconomic and fiscal crises, with the rupee plummeting against the dollar and its foreign debt burden soaring out of control.

The researchers say the central challenge for the highly fragmented African agriculture is, therefore, one of farmer access to the satellite data and analysis. “The question … is less about whether space-based and aerial technologies can help the agriculture. The question is, how exactly can these tools be put in the hands of most farmers?”